girls to be sold to old men who perhaps have already half-a-dozen concubines,” and whom the work of these wives has made rich enough to buy another.  A girl is in many instances “compelled by torture to accept the man she hates.  The whole is as purely a business transaction as the bartering of an ox or buying a horse.”  From Dugmore’s Laws and Customs he cites the following:  “It sometimes occurs that the entreaties of the daughter prevail over the avarice of the father; but such cases, the Kaffirs admit, are rare ... the highest bidder usually gains the prize.”  Holden adds that when a girl is obstreperous “they seize her by main strength, and drag her on the ground, as I have repeatedly seen;” and in his chapter on polygamy he gives the most harrowing details of the various cruelties practised on the poor girls who do not wish to be sold like cows.

That Kaffir girls “have been known to propose to a man,” as Darwin says, does not indicate that they have a choice, any more than the fact that they “not rarely run away with a favored lover.”  They might propose to a hundred men and not have their choice; and as for the elopement, that in itself shows they have no liberty of choice; for if they had they would not be obliged to run away.  Finally, how could Darwin reconcile his attitude with the remark of C. Hamilton, cited by himself, that with the Kaffirs “the chiefs generally have the pick of the women for many miles round, and are most persevering in establishing or confirming their privilege”?

I have discussed this case “in detail” in order to show to what desperate straits a hopeless theory may reduce a great thinker.  To suppose that in this “utterly barbarous tribe” the looks of the race can be gradually improved by the women accepting only those males who “excite or charm them most” is simply grotesque.  Nor is Darwin much happier with his other cases.  When he wrote that “Among the degraded Bushmen of Africa” (citing Burchell) “’when a girl has grown up to womanhood without having been betrothed, which, however, does not often happen, her lover must gain her approbation as well as that of her parents’”—­the words I have italicized ought to have shown him that this testimony was not for but against his theory.  Burchell himself tells us that Bushman girls “are most commonly betrothed” when about seven years old, and become mothers at twelve, or even at ten.  To speak of choice in such cases, in any rational sense of the word, would be farcical even if the girls were free to do as they please, which they are not.  With regard to the Fuegians, Darwin cites King and Fitzroy to the effect that the Indian obtains the consent of the parents by doing them some service, and then attempts to carry off the girl; “but if she is unwilling, she hides herself in the woods until her admirer is heartily tired of looking for her and gives up his pursuit; but this seldom happens.”  If this passage means anything, it means that it is